The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  “But I can’t be sure of that.” He crossed his arms. “Any more than I can be certain that I’ll always be able to protect you. I suppose it’s time you were told everything, from the beginning.”

  He warned me that it would be a long story, one that took time to tell. He asked me to be patient, not to interrupt with questions. “I want you to understand how things ensued, how one thing caused another,” he said. “As Nabokov wrote in his memoir, ‘Let me look at my demon objectively.’”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to understand.”

  And so he told me the story I’ve inserted at the beginning of this notebook, the story of one night in Savannah. The three men playing chess. The odd intimacy between my father and mother. The gate, the river, the shawl. And when he’d finished, he told me the story again, adding details. The men at the chess table were his fellow graduate students at the University of Virginia, visiting Savannah for the weekend. Dennis was one of the three. The other was called Malcolm.

  My father had been born in Argentina; he’d never known his father, but had been told his father was German. His parents never married. His surname, Montero, came from his Brazilian mother, and she’d died soon after his birth.

  I asked about my mother. “You told her you’d seen her before.”

  “An odd coincidence,” he said. “Yes, we’d met when we were children. My aunt lived in Georgia. I met your mother one summer afternoon on Tybee Island, and we played in the sand together. I was six. She was ten. I was a child, and she was a child.”

  I recognized the line from “Annabel Lee.”

  “To live by the sea, after a childhood living inland in Argentina — well, it made a deep impression on me. The sounds and smells of the ocean gave me a sense of peace I hadn’t known before. “ He looked away from me and stared again at the shadowbox, at the three small birds trapped inside.

  “I spent every day on the beach, building sand castles and hunting for shells. One afternoon a girl in a white sundress came up to me and cupped my chin in her hand. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re staying in Blue Buoy Cottage.’

  “She had blue eyes and red-brown hair, a small nose, full lips curved into a smile that made me smile. I looked into her face as she held my chin, and something passed between us.”

  He stopped talking. For a moment the only sound in the room was the ticking of the grandfather clock.

  “So, you see, when we met in Savannah, it never occurred to me to wonder whether we would fall in love.” His voice was low and soft. “I’d fallen in love with her twenty years before.”

  “Love?” I said.

  “Love,” he said, more loudly now. “‘A form of biological cooperation in which the emotions of each are necessary to the fulfillment of the other’s instinctive purposes.’ Bertrand Russell wrote that.”

  My father leaned back in his chair. “Why so forlorn, Ari? Russell also called love a source of delight and a source of knowledge. Love requires cooperation, and human ethics are rooted in that cooperation. In its highest form, love reveals values that otherwise we would never know.”

  “That’s so abstract,” I said. “I’d rather hear about what you felt.”

  “Well, Russell was right on all counts. Our love was a source of delight. And your mother challenged every ethic I held.”

  “Why do you always say ‘your mother’?” I asked. “Why don’t you use her name?”

  He uncrossed his arms, and laced his fingers behind his neck, looking across at me with cool appraisal. “It hurts to say it,” he said. “Even after so many years. But you’re right — you need to know who your mother was. Her name was Sara. Sara Stephenson.”

  “Where is she?” I’d asked this before, long ago, to no avail. “What happened to her? Is she still alive?”

  “I don’t know the answers to those questions.”

  “Was she beautiful?”

  “Yes, she was beautiful.” His voice sounded hoarse. “Yet she lacked the conceit that most beautiful women have. Then again, she was moody at times.”

  He coughed. “After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curaçao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L’Heure Bleue.

  “She talked about ‘perfect moments.’ One such moment happened that afternoon; she’d been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, ‘I’ll always remember the sounds of the sea and of pages turning, and the smell of L’Heure Bleue. For me they signify love.’

  “I teased her about being a foolish romantic. She teased me about being a dull intellectual. But she truly believed that the universe continually sends us sensory messages, which we can never quite decode. And she tried to send her own, back.”

  Then he said it was enough for one night — by now it was late, and very dark outside. He said he would tell me more tomorrow.

  I did not object. I went upstairs to bed, and that night I did not cry, and I did not dream.

  I’d expected my father to resume the story of his courtship of my mother, but the next day’s lessons began in a rather different manner.

  Instead of the library, he said, he preferred to meet in the living room. He had a glass of Picardo in his hand, even though he normally drank only when our lessons were concluded.

  After we’d settled in our usual chairs, he said abruptly, “I miss some of the human qualities — the ones I see in the easy way you speak with Dennis. The banter, the casual affection.

  “Of course, there are compensations.” Here he smiled the tight-lipped scholar’s smile. “One of which is memory. I remember everything. I gather from our conversations that you do not. But you have implicit memory — that is, you may lack conscious awareness of past events, yet your neural network retains distinct fragments of encoded experience.

  “My expectations have always been that, in time, you would decode them. When an appropriate stimulus triggered the memory, you would consciously remember it.”

  I held up my hand, and he stopped speaking. It took me a minute or so before I could understand what he was telling me. Finally I nodded, and he continued his story.

  My father’s life had had five distinct phases. First, his childhood, which, he said, was monotonous: regular mealtimes, bedtimes, and lessons. He said he’d tried to structure a similar monotony for me, and he quoted Bertrand Russell’s claim that monotony is an essential ingredient of a happy life.

  When he left his aunt’s house to attend the University of Virginia, my father entered another phase: his wild years, as he called them now. His classes weren’t difficult, and he devoted considerable time to drinking, gambling, and learning about women.

  Then he met my mother in Savannah, and a third phase began.

  She left her husband and moved into an apartment in an old brick house across the street from Savannah’s Colonial Cemetery. (And here, as if to prove the power of his memory, my father described to me the paths that led through the cemetery, embedded with broken oyster shells, and the patterns etched in the brick sidewalks bordering it. They were spirals. He said he didn’t like to look at them, but spirals are among my favorite symbols. Yours, too? They symbolize creation and growth if they curl clockwise from the center, and destruction if they twirl to the left. As it happens, hurricanes in the northern hemisphere twirl to the left.)

  My mother took a job working for a business that harvested, packaged, and marketed honey. She’d refused to take any money from her husband. And she began divorce proceedings.

  Every weekend my father drove eight hours from Charlottesville to Savannah, and every Monday he drove back again. He said he never minded the drive south. It was the drive back that he loathed.

  “When you’re in love, separations cause physical pain,” he said. His voice was so low that I had to lean forward to hear.

  I wondered what I might be feeli
ng about Michael, if I weren’t so numb. “Ari is numb.” It was easy for me to think about myself in the third person during that time: “Ari is depressed,” I thought often. “Ari prefers to be alone.”

  But when I was with my father, I forgot myself. Listening to his story was, I know now, the best way for me to come to terms with the death of Kathleen.

  The house in Savannah where my mother lived had three stories made of red brick, green shutters, and wrought-iron balconies and fences wrapped in wisteria vines. Her apartment was on the second floor. She and my father sometimes sat, drinking wine and talking, on the balcony facing the cemetery.

  Locals said the house was haunted. One weeknight when my mother was alone, she awoke abruptly, sensing another’s presence in the room.

  The next day on the telephone she described it to my father: “I felt chilled to the bone, but I was under the quilt, and it wasn’t a cold night. There was a mist in the room; I could see it twist in the light from the streetlamp outside. Then it condensed and began to take shape. Without even thinking, I said, ‘God, protect me. God, save me.’

  “And when I opened my eyes, the thing was gone. Completely gone. The room was warm again. I fell asleep feeling safe.”

  My father tried to console her. Even as he spoke, he thought she must be imagining things — her superstitions must be at work.

  Soon he came to think otherwise.

  “You’ve said before that my mother was superstitious.” I found I was touching the little bag of lavender at my neck, and I took my hand away from it at once.

  “She was.” He’d seen my gesture, and he knew I was thinking of Kathleen. “She thought the color blue was lucky, and the letter S.”

  “S is blue,” I said.

  He said, “She wasn’t a synesthete.”

  I listened to his story about my mother’s ghost visitor without questioning it. My skepticism had been permanently suspended the night Kathleen stood outside my window.

  One weekend when my mother and father returned to her flat after dining out, they both noticed an odd smell in the living room, a smell of mold and mildew. They opened the windows, but the odor persisted. Later, as they were about to go to bed, they saw a wisp of green smoke swirl into the bedroom. It spun around, vortex-like, and seemed to coalesce — but its shape remained indistinct.

  The room had grown cold, and my father held my mother as they watched the thing. Finally my mother said, “Hello, James.”

  Thus acknowledged, the smoke dissipated. A few seconds later, the room was warm again.

  “How did you know his name?” my father asked.

  “He’s been here more than once,” my mother said. “I didn’t mention it, because I knew you didn’t believe me when I told you about his first visit.”

  My mother was convinced that the thing was the ghost of someone named James Wilde, and next day she led my father to his grave across the street. It was a windy day, and the Spanish moss draping the live oak trees in the cemetery seemed to dance around them.

  While my father looked at the gravestone, my mother recited it from memory:

  This humble stone

  records the filial piety

  fraternal affection and manly virtues

  of

  JAMES WILDE, Esquire,

  late District Paymaster in the army of the U.S.

  He fell in a Duel on the 16th of January, 1815,

  by the hand of a man

  who, a short time ago, would have been

  friendless but for him;

  and expired instantly in his 22d year:

  dying, as he had lived

  with unshaken courage & unblemished reputation.

  By his untimely death the prop of a Mother’s

  age is broken:

  The hope and consolation of Sisters is destroyed,

  the pride of Brothers humbled in the dust

  and a whole Family, happy until then,

  overwhelmed with affliction

  Later, my father learned that Wilde’s brother had commemorated his death in a poem, and he quoted lines from it to me:

  My life is like the summer rose,

  That opens to the morning sky;

  And ere the shades of evening close,

  Is scattered on the ground — to die

  At the time my father hadn’t been convinced that the ghost was Wilde’s, but my mother felt certain.

  “So,” he told me, “I was introduced into a new realm, where facts and science couldn’t account for everything. As Edgar Poe knew too well. ‘I believe that demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary — although, you know, I don’t believe in them.’ Do you remember that line of his?”

  I didn’t remember it.

  Only much later I realized why my father told me the ghost story, and quoted all of the lines: he wanted both to distract me from, and to help me come to terms with, the loss of my best friend.

  Chapter Seven

  But I couldn’t come to terms with her death until I knew who had killed her. The McGarritts indeed were “a whole Family, happy until then, overwhelmed with affliction,” and they deserved to know — we all deserved to know — what had really happened.

  On a bitterly cold day in January, I felt surprised but oddly relieved when my father told me an FBI agent would be calling on us that afternoon.

  The agent’s name was Cecil Burton, and he was the first African-American person we’d ever had in our house. Isn’t that hard to believe? Remember, we led sheltered lives in Saratoga Springs.

  My father led Burton into the living room, and the first thing I noticed about him was his smell: a rich blend of tobacco and men’s cologne. Burton smelled good, and he looked at me as if he knew I thought so. His suit was beautifully tailored, and it managed to emphasize his muscles without being tight. His eyes had a weary expression, although he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five.

  Agent Burton stayed with us only an hour, but during that time he got more information from me about Kathleen than I’d known I had. He asked about our friendship, initially in the most casual way: “How did you two meet?” “How often did you get together?” Then his questions grew more focused: “Did you know she was jealous of you?” and “How long have you been involved with Michael?”

  I answered every question honestly, although I didn’t think we were getting anywhere at first. Then I tried to imagine what he was actually thinking as he talked, and I found I was able to read some of his thoughts.

  You’re looking into the eyes of another, and it’s as if their thoughts are telegraphed to your mind: you know exactly what they’re thinking at that moment. Sometimes, you don’t even need to look; concentrating on the words alone is enough to bring you the thoughts.

  Burton, I realized, was suspicious that my father and I were involved somehow in Kathleen’s death. Not that he had any particular evidence — he simply didn’t like the “setup” (a word I’d never used or even thought before). He’d done a background check on us; I could tell that because he kept making mental references to it, especially when he looked at my father. (Cambridge, huh? Left there all of a sudden. That was sixteen years ago. How old is this guy? He doesn’t look more than thirty. Dude must be doing Botox. Built like a marathon runner. But where’s the tan?)

  Burton asked my father, “And where is Mrs. Montero?”

  “We’re separated,” my father said. “I haven’t seen her in years.” Burton thought, Check separation agreement?

  All of this I knew he was thinking, but at other times, I couldn’t gain access. The interference was caused by a kind of mental static, I thought.

  Then I looked across at my father, whose eyes were eloquent. He knew what I was doing, and he wanted me to stop.

  “What did you and Michael talk about when he drove you home that night?” Burton’s question cut through my thoughts.

  “Oh, I don’t remember,” I said. It was the first lie I’d told him, and he seemed to know that.

  �
��Michael said things got” — his brown eyes seemed to relax at that moment — “a little hot and heavy.” In a second his eyes were alert again.

  My father said, “Is this necessary?” His voice, emotionless, somehow communicated distaste.

  “Yes, Mr. Montero,” Burton said. “I do believe it’s necessary to establish what Ariella was doing that night.”

  I wanted to hear what he was thinking, but I refrained. Instead I tilted my head and looked hard at Burton without reading his eyes. “We were kissing,” I said.

  After he’d shown Burton out, my father returned to the living room. Before he’d had a chance to sit down, I asked him, “Do you remember Marmalade? The neighbor’s cat? Do you know who killed her?”

  “No.”

  He and I exchanged a look of mutual wariness. Then he left the room, headed toward the basement.

  Had he lied to Burton? I wondered. If not, why hadn’t he been in the living room when I’d come in that night? He was such a creature of habit, I thought. If he was lying, then where had he been that night?

  And beneath all of those questions, the real one: had my father been involved in Kathleen’s death? That was how I phrased it. I couldn’t bring myself to think: had he killed her?

  Yes, Burton was with us only an hour, but he altered the atmosphere of our house. He introduced an element never present before: suspicion. As I went upstairs, the sound of my feet on the steps, the shapes of the Moroccan cushions on the landing, even the paintings on the wall — all seemed strange and secretive to me, almost sinister.